Question

My Delphi XE application is based on a single EXE using a local server DLL created by RemObjects and uses a lot of memory for a specific operation until it generates an exception saying there are not enough memory. So I’m trying to understand why and where this is happening so I placed various steps throughout my code where I report on memory usage. The problem is that I’m getting very different information based on the method used to get memory usage information:

1. If I use the method explained here which asks FastMM directly for both the Client EXE and Server DLL, here is what I get:

   • STEP 1: [client] = 36664572 – [server] = 3274976
   • STEP 2: [client] = 62641230 – [server] = 44430224
   • STEP 3: [client] = 66665630 – [server] = 44430224

2. Now if I use the method explained here which uses GetProcessMemoryInfo, I get far more memory usage:

   • STEP 1: [process] = 133722112
   • STEP 2: [process] = 1072115712
   • STEP 3: [process] = 1075818496

It looks like second method is the right based on my memory problems but how could the FastMM method be so “low” ? And what can explain the difference ?

Answer 1

GetProcessMemoryInfo also reports memory that is not managed by FastMM, like memory that is allocated by the various non Delphi dlls you might call (like winapi).

Also FastMM can allocate more memory from Windows that your application actually uses for internal structures, fragmentation and pooling.

And as last, with GetProcessMemoryInfo you measuring the Workingset size. That is what part of the application’s memory currenctly in RAM instead if in the page file. It includes more than just data structures and is definately not comparable to the total memory the application has allocated. PagefileUsage would be more comparable. Workingset size almost never is what you are looking for. See here for a better explanation.

So they both give different results because they both measure different things.